ASRock Z87 Extreme4 LGA 1150 Mainboard Review. Page 8

This board is built on the new Intel Z87 chipset. It is a mainstream model: not two simple to suffer from lack of public interest to it, yet not too complex to scare potential users away by excessive onboard technologies and high price.

Performance Comparison

We usually benchmark mainboards in two test modes: at the default settings and with the CPU and memory overclocked. The first mode is interesting because it shows how well the mainboards work with their default settings. It is a known fact that most users do not fine-tune their systems, they simply choose the optimal BIOS settings and do nothing else. That is why we run a round of tests almost without interfering in any way with the default mainboard settings. Only for Asus Z87-K mainboard we manually input nominal multipliers for all processor cores in the mainboard BIOS in an attempt to prevent the frequency from dropping, while for ASRock Z87 Extreme4 we manually disabled Power Saving Mode. For comparison purposes we also included the results of the previously tested Gigabyte GA-Z87-D3H mainboard. The results are sorted in the descending performance order.

Nominal Mode

We used Cinebench 11.5. All tests were run five times and the average result of the five runs was taken for the performance charts.

We have been using Fritz Chess Benchmark utility for a long time already and it proved very illustrative. It generated repeated results, the performance in it is scales perfectly depending on the number of involved computational threads.

x264 FHD Benchmark v1.0.1 (64 bit) allows us to compare the system performance during video transcoding against the results in the database. So far this is the only utility in our testing suite that supports AVX2 instructions implemented in Haswell processors. The average results of the five test runs are displayed on the following diagram:

We measured the performance in Adobe Photoshop CS6 using our own benchmark made from Retouch Artists Photoshop Speed Test that has been creatively modified. It includes typical editing of four 24-megapixel images from a digital photo camera.

In the archiving test a 1 GB file is compressed using WinRAR archiving tool with maximum compression level.

The recently released PCMark 8 suite allows us to assess the overall system performance, the efficiency of its storage sub-system, measure the battery life of a mobile device. We use the “Home” test package that includes typical home use applications: web browsing, creating and editing documents, simple games, photo editing, video chatting.

The next diagram shows only CPU tests from the 3DMark Fire Strike. This score is obtained in a special physics test that emulates the behavior of a complex gaming system working with numerous objects:

The benchmark integrated into the Hitman Absolution game turned out very convenient. It can be launched directly from the game, from the game launcher utility and even from the command prompt. We use maximum quality settings from the “Ultra” profile and a pretty high screen resolution.

Batman: Arkham City game also reacts eagerly to any changes in the CPU clock frequency, and it uses DirectX 11. We ran game’s integrated benchmark five times with “Very High” image quality settings and then take the average of the five runs for the diagrams.

Similar mainboards are prone to deliver the same performance under identical test conditions, but this time around the difference is quite large. The ASRock Z87 Extreme4 doesn’t seem to use any overclocking at its default settings, yet it takes a leading position in every benchmark. In some tests its advantage is quite substantial.